


all we have's all there is

by hellebored (orphan_account)



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon-Typical Violence, Drabble, Found Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-30 03:13:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 766
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17215931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/hellebored
Summary: A short reflection on found family and John's place in it. AU season 4.





	all we have's all there is

**Author's Note:**

> Something from ye olde wips folder that won't ever make it into a bigger story. :)

John comes out of a warehouse firefight with no damage but some bloody knuckles and a shirt he’ll have to replace; the officers with him are all fine, the perp’s in custody. It’s shaping up to be a good day, so of course he isn’t surprised when five gunshots echo right outside the hangar doors.

They bolt for the door in time to see two things: a black car fishtailing toward the docks, and Carter sprawled out by her cruiser staring at blue open sky and struggling to breathe. There’s bubbles of blood on her lips like some sort of garish lipstick.

John’s on his knees yanking open the velcro at the top and sides of Carter’s vest while the world around him suddenly erupts with sounds of gravel crunching under feet and voices shouting into radios. He hears car doors slam, sirens starting. He hears Finch’s voice, calm in his ear, saying the ambulance is less than five minutes away.

Carter’s breathing starts to even out while he’s feeling her ribs. Three bullets, no penetration. He pushes up her shirt. She’s got welts as wide as his fist and several cracked ribs from what he can tell, but none of them are broken inward.

He describes what he’s seeing to Finch and suddenly Shaw’s on the line. “Sounds like pulmonary contusion,” she says. “Blunt force trauma to the lungs. The bruising can cause people to spit up blood. She’ll live, unless she ends up with something like untreated tension hemothorax-”

“Thank you, Miss Shaw,” Finch says, and cuts her off.

There’s a touch on John’s sleeve, fingers grasping his elbow. It’s Carter. Her skin’s a little ashen around her eyes and lips, but she’s focusing, tracking his movements.

“Asshole was there when I turned around. Think I clipped him before he got to his car.”

“Lionel’s on it,” John says, listening as Finch tracks progress of the chase. Carter nods once. She lets her head drop back to the pavement, too exhausted for anything else.

John wants to wipe the blood from her mouth but doesn’t want her to see it, so he takes her hand instead. The beds of her fingernails are greyish blue but her pulse is steady. He holds on like that, fingers on her wrist, until paramedics gently and politely request that he step away.

“Are you her partner, Officer…?” a medic asks as she sets up an IV line. John pauses. Carter’s looking at him from the stretcher.

“Detective Riley,” he says without hesitation, and Joss’s face flickers with a smile. Warm in spite of it all. Proud.

“Fusco’s her partner,” he says, raspy and soft. “But she’ll always have me too.”

“You got me, John,” she says, affirmative, and they load her into the ambulance and seal her away before he realizes there’s a double meaning embedded in that statement like two sides on a coin.

_I have you, and you have me._

“I got ‘im,” Fusco says over the comm, and John hears himself saying _good work, Lionel;_ Finch's reedy voice is in his ear, and from some camera overhead a guardian observes everything.

He folds into his car and lets Finch guide him to Lionel, knowing Carter will be safe, that friendly eyes follow her progress, that Shaw will be there at the hospital in a pair of stolen scrubs and Root’s help to get in the door.

He pulls over next to Lionel’s car and watches while his unlikely friend fastens the perp’s hands behind their back; Lionel’s face flushes with a snarling edge of smug accomplishment, but pinched lines carve grooves of worry around his mouth over the partner who is the best of them all.

“'Bout time you showed up,” he says to John with a sharp-sided grin. Turning to the man he has bent over the car, he hoists him up straight and says, “you sure are lucky, you dumb son of a bitch. If you’d been smart enough to headshot a cop in a vest, even Johnny-boy here might turn a blind eye if I tossed you in the river for the fishes.”

“Bring him in, Lionel,” John says mildly, but inside he feels a stillness, resolute and calm. Lionel’s words are true enough.

Fusco and Carter, Root and Shaw, Finch: the sum of many parts, good and bad, healed and broken. Even if there was nothing else, no conspiracy, no shadow war playing out over fiber-optics and phone lines, they’d be enough to kill for, if he has to. To die for.

To _live_ for.

All they’ve got is each other.


End file.
